I started Forge, which is an open-source, free project that lets you play Magic: The Gathering against the computer. Currently other people are updating Forge and there will be no more posts to this blog.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Adding ManaPool

I’m glad that MTG Forge now has a mana pool because I accidentally left it out. I know what your thinking, how could a guy forget one of the most important parts of Magic. OK, I still forgot it. Also from time to time I forget what are the 5 magic colors in Magic as well as the names of all 5 basic lands. Yes I remember them, but you wouldn’t believe the number of times that I need to know Plains, Mountain, Island, Forest, Swamp while programming MTG Forge. Even then I almost forgot Swamp.

Let me go back to the beginning. The truth is that MTG Forge had around 50 cards and was not released on the Internet. I was just adding good cards from the 9th Edition when I saw Early Harvest. I thought it would be cool so I easily coded it. The card untaps all of your land so it was very straightforward to program.

Then I put together a small test deck to make sure it worked. After I played Early Harvest reality hit me, THERE WAS NO MANAPOOL. Granted if you had 6 Forests, you could tap 3 to play a card and then the tap the other 3 to play Early Harvest but without a mana pool the card is severely crippled.

So from then on MTG Forge officially didn’t have a mana pool and I didn’t care. Which meant that my program couldn’t support Dark Ritual, Sol Ring, Seething Song or Magic’s most expensive card: Black Lotus. I shrugged a little and told myself that I could at it later if I really had to.

The truth is I didn’t write any of the mana pool code, it was all done by the nice guys on the forums: dennis, rob, and others. By the way I didn’t make a big deal about it but MTG Forge also supports protection, exalted, and shroud. Dennis had to update ALL of the targeting code, which was an enormous task. I didn’t think MTG Forge would ever have protection and shroud because it was such a difficult task.

5 comments:

Hi, it's nice to play again with the dark ritual and black lotus. I want to ask if you noted that since the mana pool was added, you can use the oponent lands as mana source... I know it's an avoidable bug, but :)

You CAN play the abilities of your opponents creatures which IS a bug, but I consider that funny. If you get really frustrated with the computer because it is winning, just use his creatures against him.